Ithaca Has Gorges

Enough Turkey

2007-12-17T01:19:00.000-05:00

Nothing's bloggier than a blog about blogging on another blog. TV happened! Mikey Likes TV talked about it! A [very local] celebrity was involved!

Butterbarbell Turkeys

2007-11-10T20:40:00.000-05:00

Is 408-East keeping the tradition alive? The SF chapter hosts tomorrow and flying standby is cheap I hear.

"""
Many of us will be out of town or otherwise busy on Thanksgiving proper, and as it's a celebration of things we appreciate, we'll be hosting a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner for the friends of 3005 23rd st. After all, good friends, Guitar Hero, and free food* in a conveniently nearby location make up a good percentage of what you have to be thankful for. Probably double-digits.

We'll be aiming for a 7 o'clock dinner. Tivoed "60 Minutes" is on at 8:00. The backup Indian food will be ordered at 6:30. Get your requests in.

* Now about the food. We can promise the staples: some manner of turkey, potatoes, gravy, wine. We'll also encourage everybody to bring a little something to share. You know... Cranberry Sauce, Jello Parfait, Olde English. Whatever makes it feel more thanksgivingey for you. Our kitchen is available for prep.

This can be productive as well. Think of it as a practice Thanksgiving where you can test your new recipe for spinach-cranberry sauce on non-blood-relatives before subjecting your own gene pool to Necrotizing Fasciitis on game day. It's Darwinism, though some amount of I.D. in dish selection would be appreciated.
"""

More Evidence Yet for Evolution

2007-08-08T03:48:00.000-04:00

I should be half dead. Millions richer, but half dead. The principle of self-preservation just cost me several million dollars (and a pair of broken sunglasses).

Barry Bonds's 756th home run ball landed close enough for me to smell the cologne he was wearing when he hit it (BTW Barry, Nautica Competition is sooo 1992 Pittsburgh Pirates.)

Unfortunately, I left unscathed; with nothing to show for the struggle but the passing barroom fame of having been a row above the scrum from which the world's newest millionaire emerged.

But at least I wasn't the only one to whiff:

This wasn't my first dose of Barry Bonds-related history. I'll accept game invitations to an eventual A-rod attempt.

[Update: clarified which homerun it was (the big one.) There are videos linked from the comments.]

I Wonder if "Toffeeright Infringement" Is Next

2007-06-13T03:07:00.000-04:00

Before anyone had made friends with Carl Schurz or Bagel Bob, moving to the Upper East Side seemed like a clear-cut bad idea. The only bar within walking distance was The Big Easy [don't bother fact-checking that one, it's the only one], the nearest subway stop was at Union Square, and it was municipal law to tip your doormen and elevator operators double what it would cost to rent an apartment in the hyper-affordable East Village. So, when my girlfriend said she'd be moving there in '04, I scoffed at the idea, saying "Nobody lives up there other than rich white women." Confused by the reference to an apparently well-dressed stranger, she sincerely asked me, "Who is Rich Whitewomen?" A laugh-track was cued, there may have been a slide whistle involved, and a timeless emoniker was born.

Several years and hundreds of invitations to funnel illicit Nigerian funds into America at a handsome profit later, richwhitewomen lives on at various domains. You can imagine my disgust when, after reading a harmless article about 5 Boroughs' Staten Island Landfill ice cream, I found the ice cream named after the Upper East Side: Rich White Vanilla.

I think we can all agree that Staten Island Landfill ice cream sounds delicious and funny, and that the related boycott is way out of line. But blatantly ripping off my original idea that the Upper East Side is best characterized by richness and whiteness is too much. Someone needs to put a stop to these Pat Boone creameryists, before richwhitewomen goes the way of my former email addresses, cherrygarcia@phantasytour.net and newcoke@theinternet.

Shack's Back

2007-03-21T03:24:00.001-04:00

If there's ever a topic worth blogging about, it's the opening of the Shake Shack.

The official opening is today, Wednesday, at 11am, but Eater ran a post at around 11am Monday saying the Shack would be soft serving (get it?!?!?) at noon. Realizing this might be the only lunchtime with a tolerable line, I shanghaied two really pretty girls (just like last year) and got on line.

The result was predictably thrilling: a delicious, appropriately sized and salted burger served In-N-Out style on a potato bun. My experience with the Shack last year was a gentle downward slope, from perfect in March to tired in November. The hibernation did wonders, nuff said.

But what made this experience even more bloggable (and what took me 36 hours to produce) is the newly-found and indisputable evidence that I, lowly SS devotee, got served before esteemed foodwriter Ed Levine. Indisputable!, courtesy of Serious Eats' Flickr stream.

Indisputable! (Click for a ridiculously high-qual version and see for yourself.):

History as it exists inside my head

2007-01-13T12:16:00.000-05:00

It is MLK day, so I'll talk about the Martin Luther King, Jr as he exists in my imagination. This is like writing a scholarly work without doing any research, so understand that anything I say here is by definition apocryphal, or not really, depending on who wins when one wrestles with the word apocryphal. For instance, some definitions include the stipulation that an apocryphal story be of dubious authenticity AND be widely circulated and believed to be true. Clearly what I say here will satisfy the first criterion, but it will not likely be widely circulated, nor believed to be true.

That MLK has an official holiday is offensive to his memory. At least he deserves a holiday (remind me to do an entry on columbus day 2007), but if he could see that a country that so half-heartedly embraced his ideals officially honors him anyway, he would be mightily and eloquently enraged.

The holiday that co-opts him remembers his earnest and optimistic battle against segregation, and by proxy against racism in the south. He changed laws and attitudes with moral force and intellect. He was an orator, in a time when eloquence rather than marketing was a unit of political capital. He saved us from some embarassing and backward legislation. This was certainly a movement everyone can agree to honor in retrospect.

The MLK in my mind is not proud of these accomplishments, because I remember the man as he left off. As his knowledge and activism expanded from local to national to global, he began to refigure the scale of the problem of injustice. He travelled to the north and found racism there too, racism that scared him a lot more. This wasn't the cartoonish racism of segregated drinking fountains; this was insidious, systemic, subtle.

He found large black communities already deep in the grip of the cyclical social problems poverty engenders. These communites had been oppressed long enough that a blow had been dealt to their moral fiber. In cities quick to incarcerate a black man and slow to educate him, a cycle of incarceration, crime, teenage pregnancy and drugs had already been established. Fear set in. Had the accomplishments in the south just been to convince the legislature that racism couldn't be codified? How much harder would it be to fight racism that lives in between the laws? The grand scale of history became clear. The 20 year old black man in prison, working eight hours a day for a few cents an hour was still a slave. He was part of the same historical system of oppression and struggle for resources as a Vietnamese family caught in the midst of a war betewen the US and the Soviet Union.

So MLK's activism became global. He began to speak out against issues that made him seem radical. He began to denounce the Vietnam war before this was politically acceptable, and for this he was ostracized and reviled. He was abandoned by the NAACP, who, in their defense, had to play politics. But King was done with politics. He was beholden to the truth, and he understood history well enough to know that the truth he was to speak would cost him his life. Without fear, without the slightest inclination toward violence he presaged his own death.

Today is as good as any to think about this man and what his life meant, but don't let the government fool you into thinking he was on their side.

Cut On The Bias

2006-12-08T04:13:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of reasons to love the New York Times, but their ability to call President Bush dumb in the subtlest of ways is what really keeps me coming back. In an article published today about Prezbo's reaction to the Iraq Study Group's general drubbing of his war strategy (the s- word used obviously sparingly), they wore their faded Call Bush Dumb T-shirt in especially bitchy mode:

“'You wanted frankness — I thought we would succeed quicker than we did,' the president said to a British reporter who asked for candor."

If only they had let the recorder run long enough to hear, "If you remember, we asked for candor, stupid!"

As the potency of the Bush regime continues to fade, is anyone else noticing the surprisingly mellower essence of lovable loser? Bush-bashing is hardly even fun anymore!

Rasterbate

2006-11-04T13:54:00.000-05:00

Rasterbation has been around for several years, but it's new to me. I swear. I never used to do it. Now I can't stop. Some days it's all I can think about. This all started when I found out about the rasterbator.

The concept is simple. A rasterized image is just one that is made into dots. The rasterbator rasterizes any image and outputs a PDF document of dots. You control how many sheets of paper the PDF document should be, and thus how large the final image is. There is no limit to the size. At a distance, an enormous rasterbated image looks photorealistic.

This is great for:
1. Pranks
2. Art
3. Prank Art

Surprised to find me in your room? Don't respond by defiling the rasterbation.

I now have such luminaries on my wall as Nathan Lucash, Lauren Hough, Craig Antosh (ret.), Caitlin Donovan and Daniel Stenson. No Fred Fang.

Google: Rasterbator

A Mashup for a Good Cause

2006-10-20T17:36:00.000-04:00

Gap PRODUCT RED (featuring supermodel Christy Turlington and superactress Dakota Fanning):

Meet Gap PRODUCT PINK:

How's that make you feel about AIDS?

(Fast Hugs has more on PRODUCT RED, plus even more about vaginas.)

Red hair genes up skin cancer risks!!

2006-10-12T14:23:00.000-04:00

Poor Ross!

Fred Fang works at Google, but they never taught him how to hyperlink.

thai coup

2006-09-19T17:07:00.000-04:00

thai coup

sometimes you go on
a trip to america
and lose your country.

Beer for Bags!

2006-06-09T17:28:00.000-04:00

Looks like it's time to dust off the old IHG (in German colloquial, der IthHas) to bring you this exciting offer.
Crumpler Bags of 45 Spring Street or 49 8th Ave (via Australia) is having a beer-for-bags barter event, and it's brilliant. The concept is simple: bring them a certain number of the beers of their choosing, walk away with a messenger bag or laptop case or beanbag chair of yours. Depending on where you buy your beer the exchange rate may vary, but I went to nearby New Beer Distributors (on Christie St between Rivington and Delancey) and spent under $50 to get a Complete Seed bag that retails for $95 plus tax.
Already you're thinking, "great concept, sweet deal," because I've known you for years and you're relatively predictable. But it gets better! When you make your exchange the cashier takes a polaroid of you (if you're smart, the picture will show you drinking a cold beer in the store), and then that polaroid serves as your invitation to a party Crumpler's throwing on Sunday night with all of the beers collected over the week. You and your plus-one are given the opportunity (practically dared!) to drink back whatever beers you traded in.
This is how you will look:

This is how you will get in on Sunday:

Oh, the guy working at the store (and drinking at the Alligator later that night..?) told me they're expecting to have 10,000 beers. So...race!

Burgers and Dogs

2006-03-21T17:53:00.000-05:00

0321061635a
Originally uploaded by richwhitewomen.

Yo the Shake Shack's open. I made my pilgrimage at around three and stood in line for 90 minutes (3 people, actually. How did you all miss this?) to get my first Shack burger and Chicago dog of the season. I got a $2 Gift Card as a reward for my efforts, if that gives any of you enough incentive to go in the next 12 minutes.

Graffiti Research Lab (Rats)

2006-03-21T05:01:00.000-05:00

0311062135a
Originally uploaded by richwhitewomen.

The Alamo at Astor Place used to be art before these roughnecks showed up. I came out of the subway after a long day at work to the above scene. I'm hoping my camera phone captured enough information for the authorities to crack this ring of vandals, but if not they can click on "these roughnecks" (since none of you bastards follow the links) to see videos of this and other scandals.

Sorry You're Dead

2006-03-10T18:13:00.000-05:00

Mr. John Profumo, your death must have been sad for everyone who knew you, including London's homeless and alcoholic population. But let me thank you for dying, and for giving the press a reason to introduce a new generation of gawkers to Ms. Christine Keeler:

Here's hoping that all Decemberists songs gain historical relevence in the obituaries.

PS I'm 45% Dixie. Barely in Yankeedom. I prefer to credit the nationally accepted "correct" accent that bubbles up from the mid-Hudson River.

Melanoma

2006-02-28T19:58:00.000-05:00

I had it! Now it's cut out.

Diagnosis:
A. Malignant Melanoma. Superficial Spreading Type. Invasive to Clark's Level II. Approximately 0.39 mm in Thickness. Arising as a focal change in a nevus with architectural disorder. Note: There is no evidence of ulceration. The lymphocytic response is patchy and sparse. The mitotic rate is low. Small epitheliod cell types predominate. A complete excision of the lesion is recommended.

Translation:
I have a giant hole in my belly, but I'm not going to die. Nothing like a sudden immense fear of death to give you a little perspective on life. This has really taught me the dubiously important lesson that I should continue to enjoy myself.

Weddings!

2006-02-23T18:21:00.000-05:00

I'm going to the Lu-Deforest wedding of the century!

Ross, I bet you didn't think I could pull that off!?
(We should definately hang out when I go)

Think about it, there must be High Line love

2006-02-01T13:22:00.000-05:00

According to the blogosphere, illegal but easy enough access to the High Line is going to be blocked in a matter of days.

For those of y'all who don't know, the High Line is what remains of a west side el train that has been abandoned since 1980. Since then it has persisted in various states of disrepair, including being partially disassembled in 1991.

Despite its idleness for the past quarter century, scholars and historians still like to wax romantic about a time when trains would come barreling down tenth avenue, cleverly nicknamed "Death Avenue" for the increased likelihood of death-by-cowcatcher. The futuristic comic book culture also has dedicated a fair amount of time to dreaming up impossible ideas for the 1.5 mile-stretch of track, including a skywalk, an unlikely amphitheater, and the most ridiculous swimming pool ever built.

The actual future of the highline will be as a promenade:

But in the meantime, I'm ready to make an 11th-hour effort to walk the remains of the highline before it gets all corporate. This will certainly involve brown bags and cigarettes, and with any luck an 8 megapixel digital camera.

(info, photos)

Day, Night, and other Jobs

2006-01-05T14:50:00.000-05:00

Ross, is there something you haven't been telling us?

Day, Night, and other Jobs

2006-01-05T14:42:00.000-05:00

Ross, is there something you haven't been telling us?

Day, Night, and other Jobs

2006-01-05T14:36:00.000-05:00

Ross, is there something you haven't been telling us?

Talkin' MTA Strike Blues

2005-12-14T13:55:00.000-05:00

From ABC News:
"Subway and bus workers voted over the weekend to give the union's board the power to call a strike at 12:01 a.m. Friday when the current contract runs out. City officials filed court papers Wednesday in a lawsuit seeking... lost revenues and overtime and fines of $25,000 that would double each day for those who walk out on the job."

So the workers are prepared to face fines and walk out at 12:01am tomorrow night. I'm prepared to organize a party to get on a bus at 11:52, and then when the driver takes off 9 minutes later have a Prankster-esque night of debauchery. An MTA bus all to ourselves. Who's coming with me? Where are we going? And what are we writing on the bus' LED?

Rummy

2005-12-10T10:45:00.000-05:00

I just transcribed this quote from Jim Lehrer's interview with Donald Rumsfeld. Lehrer asked about what Rumsfeld thinks of John McCain's public criticism of the job he's doing.

"You know, if you do something, somebody's not going to like it, and if you don't do anything, nobody's going to not like that, but who wants to live a life like that?

One Flu Over the Avian's Nest

2005-10-24T17:58:00.000-04:00

Reposting because I want to be at the top:

You may have been noticed the flurry of reports about the dangers of the Avian Flu infecting the American media in this particular news cycle. You may have been alarmed, or you may be numb to the general sense of oddly-content alarm cultivated particularly by the cable news networks, to the point where you can no longer distinguish the legitimately alarming story from the story that's only alarming by virtue of it being considered news. Well where would you turn to clarify the ensuing confusion but our intermittently updated and generally subject-less blog? I'm not sure, but here you are.

Flu pandemics occur periodically on the scale of centuries, and they differ drastically from the yearly flu that waxes and wanes with the seasons. While a bad flu season can kill significant numbers of immunocompromised, elderly and infant people, flu pandemics are caused by strains that can also easily kill healthy young and middle-aged people. The yearly flu virus mutates each year, allowing it to catch our immune systems by surprise, but it can't really change enough to catch the immune system totally off guard. In other words there is some cross-tolerance to the strain this year because of exposure to the strain last year and the year before that and before that. One essential difference between the pandemic strains and the yearly strains, one that helps make them so deadly, is exactly their difference. They are similar viruses in terms of how they reproduce inside our cells, but they look different enough on a molecular level, that our body has little to no acquired immunity, and does not begin to mount a targeted immune response until about five days into an infection, when it may be too late.

They also tend to be more virulent. This means that they reproduce at a much higher rate than the yearly flu virus, which has a bit more of a symbiotic relationship with its human host. Lets take up an historical example, as scientists have recently, by actually reusurrecting the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic. They did this by extracting some virus genetic material from a victim of the 1918 pandemic that has been frozen in Alaskan permafrost until recently. Why this person was trekking across Alaskan permafrost with a bad case of the 1918 flu remains unclear to me. In any case, the genetic material, injected into kidney cells in the lab can incorporate into the genetic code of the kidney cells and instruct the cells to make more of the virus. Hence, from frozen Alaskan (different from baked Alaskan) you end up quickly with resurrected deadly virus. Injecting it in mice, you find interesting things like that 39,000 times more virus particles are produced in the mice lungs after four days than produced by the yearly flu strain, and all the mice die, whereas they tend not to when infected with the yearly strain. This is a telling experiment, with implications for the nature of these pandemics, which we'll discuss below, but another interesting question along the way is: should we resurrect things like this?

Though the generally pretty smart editorial staff of Nature seem to have given it much thought and decided that it was indeed a good idea, and further they decided that it's a good idea to publish the sequence of the 1918 virus genome, others disagree. As nature reports, Richard Ebright of Rutgers University suggests that "Tumpey et al. have constructed, and provided procedures for others to construct, a virus that represents perhaps the most effective bioweapons agent now available." Ebright and others suggest that the escape of the virus from the level 3 biosecurity laboratory (as opposed to level 4) where it resides is a significant risk, "verging on inevitability."

Hmmmm. But bioterror or laboratory carelessness might not be necessary to trigger the next pandemic, because the natural world is about ready to do it for us. Whatever its risks, the resurrection and sequencing of the 1918 virus taught us something valuable and disturbing about it's origin: it was originally an avian strain. This suggests that the world is currently in a similar situation to the one it was in sometime preceding 1918. The current avian flu, classified as H5N1, is epidemic among domestic birds in southeast asia, and the New York Times recently reported the first evidence of spread to Europe, along with unconfirmed reports that the virus is being carried by wild fowl, which, unlike poultry are virtually impossible to contain or slaughter. The containment and slaughter of infected birds is the key to reducing the risk of a human pandemic.
In its current form the virus rarely jumps to humans, but when it does is shows an significant virulance, having killed 60 of the 116 people known to be infected. It's hard to get a handle on the actual mortality rate, since milder cases are less likely to be diagnosed. Also, the virus has only been shown to be transmitted from human to human in a few isolated cases. Some argue that in the course of this mutational change the virus will likely become less fatal. So it's difficult to gauge how fatal the disease is now and how it might change, but what's clear is that it's currently plenty deadly. The 1918 flu had an actual mortality rate of about 2.5-5%, but was contagious enough that roughly half of the world's population contracted the disease. This added up to about 20-50 million deaths. These are rough estimates, but in any case, the H5N1 strain currently shows that it is plenty deadly to produce a massive pandemic.

20-50 million deaths is hard to get a handle on. It's (probably) more deaths than occured in WWII. It's more deaths than AIDS has caused in decades. The 1918 virus transiently lowered life expectancy in the US by about a decade.

But surely medicine has made great strides since 1918? In some ways it has. For instance, up to half of the 20-50 million deaths in 1918 were due to bacterial pneumonia superinfection, to which the virus increases susceptibility. This complication would easiliy be treated with modern antibiotics.

But science hasn't done as well at combatting viruses with drugs as it has with bacteria. There are drugs on the market that have anti-viral effects indicated for influenza. The most notable and probably most effective of these is Tamiflu (oseltamivir). There's no good way to judge how effective this would be in changing the course of bird flu. Most likely it would help a little bit, but even this small advantage over the virus could mean the difference of life and death in an infected person. It could also be taken prophylacticly to reduce the risk that a person would accquire the virus in the first place, but this would be expensive and could lead to the emergence of a resistant strain. Unfortunately, this is a recently developed drug, and as such it's still under patent to the Pharmaceutical manufacturer, Roche, which means two things: there's not enough of it, and it's expensive. Also, other countries are far ahead of the US in stockpiling the drug, so that while some European countries have enough to cover about 40% of their populations, while last I saw we had enough for about 2%. I think it would not be unreasonable to try to buy some tamiflu at this point. Of course governments and officials don't recommend it because they don't want it all to be bought up by private individuals, but let's just say that it wouldn't be alarmist at this point. Unfortunately, it's very expensive (last I saw about $70 for the standard dose which is 75 mg 2x per day for five days) and it's a prescription medication, so I don't know how it works to buy it on the internet (but I know that you can).

A vaccine is a much better hope. This would be a preventative injection, which would provide at least partial immunity, and at worst would make the course of the disease more survivable (because the immune system would be more prepared) Unfortunately, this is a pretty slow process. There's not much money in yearly flu vaccines, so they're still produced by some pretty old technology, where the vaccine is actually cultured in massive numbers of chicken eggs. Not only is this weird and slow (at least 6 months), it could be problemmatic if the avian strain continues to proliferate. It's hard to use chicken eggs to make vaccine when all the chickens already have the disease that the vaccine is designed to prevent. There are several countries and corporations working on this, but vaccine making is a risky business, with low profits and a large potential for a bust in any given year. As such, the industry works best when it's subsidized by governments with good public health planning in mind. This is not the case here. In fact, the US relies on foreign sources for most of its yearly vaccine (you may recall the large shortage last season, which resulted in many unecessary deaths, but would have resulted in more had last year not been a mild season). As such we have next to no capacity to produce such a vaccine, nor is any American company working on such a vaccine, despite the fact that it would be very lucrative already, and in the case of a pandemic, will become so valuable that the countries that do have it will likely not share any with us for any price until their populations are completely immunized, which may not ever happen in time.

In the end it's impossible to predict how likely a pandemic is to emerge from the H5N1 strain, but one thing is clear, that as the disease continues to spread around the globe in birds, the chance of it making the jump to humans increases in kind. I've heard people I trust put it at about 50-50 to occur in the next few years. Given that with our current level of preparation, this would likely kill millions in the US alone, it seems like time to be reasonably alarmed.

www.nature.com: The 1918 flu virus is resurrected
www.nejm.com: Avian Influenza A (H5N1) Infection in Humans, Neuraminidase Inhibitors for Influenza
www.nytimes.com

2L2Q

2005-10-19T02:55:00.000-04:00

Between marathon sessions of beach volleyball, soaking in the (disgusting) warmth of the 2nd floor ball pit, and mindlessly staring at query beams emanating from the 3-d globe, I sometimes also have to do real "work." Some of the workday is spent in front of the computer (like now,) and some of it is spent in meetings. With people. Today I met with hammer. Whoa.